Millennial Independent Voters More Often Lean Toward Democrat than Republican

While checking off "Independent" when registering to vote is increasingly popular for young people, a new poll finds such voters more often lean to the left in their political views.

According to the Associated Press, the new poll found half of Americans aged 18 to 33 are registered independent voters. However, the data says half of these independent voters actually favor the Democratic Party, the largest share for any age group in at least 10 years.

The poll comes from the Pew Research Center and was co-authored by Paul Taylor, the group's executive vice president.

"It's not that they don't have strong political opinions, they do," he told the AP. "It's simply that they choose not to identify themselves with either political party."

The poll also suggested that millennials are deviating from the values of the previous generation. Unlike Generation X (34-39), the Baby Boomers (40-68) and the Silent Generation (69-86), millennials are more likely to be single and without a church they regularly attend.

Compared to the 50 percent of independent voters who lean to the left, 34 percent said their political views aligned with the Republican Party.

"They don't choose to identify, but they have strong views and their views are views that most people conventionally associate with the Democratic Party," Taylor said. "They believe in a big activist government on some of the social issues of the day - gay marriage, marijuana legalization, immigration. Their views are much more aligned with the Democratic Party."

Taylor was unsure if these voters would change their stances as they get older because their views are dependent on the Democratic Party's stance on social issues. The poll was conducted through cell phone or landline interviews with 1,821 adults between Feb. 18 and Feb. 23.

"People can change over the course of their lifetimes," Taylor said. "At the same time, the behaviors, attitudes, the voting patterns and experiences that generations sort of encounter as they come of age in their late teens and early 20s are important and this generation as political actors has come in three or four national elections in a row now as distinctively Democratic and liberal despite the fact they don't want to identify that way."